Storage and Bandwidth
What Do You REALLY Need?
The amount of storage you need depends on several factors:
- How large your site files are
- How large any databases are
- How often you receive large email attachments
- Whether you leave all email on the server or regularly download it to your computer
The larger your site or the more image, video or audio files it contains, the more space you need to store it in. If you depend on several databases containing a lot of information, they take up space. If you have several email accounts, all of which are active and may receive attachments, you need more room for them. If you prefer to store your email on your web server and not download to a computer at least every few weeks, that will add to your storage needs over time.
Most personal and small business sites need 5-25 mb for the files and any databases, plus another 1-5 mb for each email account which is downloaded regularly. Large email attachments may temporarally use more space, but when they are downloaded, that space is freed up again. A single image file may be larger than the page it appears on, so if your site uses several different, non-repeating images on each page (like a portfolio or catalog site), you will have greater storage needs.
I am hosting an artist's portfolio site which has 50+ pages and over 100 large and small images, all of which take up less than 25 mb total. This site (jolanders.com) has 400+ files which use 11.5 mb of space. The databases take up another 1-2 mb, and I tend to accumulate 5-10 mb in emails between weekly or semi-monthly downloads to my desktop computer.
The amount of bandwidth you need depends on:
- How many hits (page views and each file that makes up the page) your site receives
- How large the files that get sent to the visitor's browser are
A site with multiple graphics and scripts on each page will have a large number of hits relative to the number of page views. Looking at your page views is useful when analyzing site statistics, but the number of hits (and the files those hits represent) are what affect your bandwidth usage.
The artist's site receives 900-1000 visitors each month, who view an average of 2,700 pages and generate 24,000 hits. Average bandwidth needs are around 375 mb. This site receives 1200-1500 visitors each month, who view an average of 3,600 pages and generate 13,000 hits. Average bandwidth needs are around 200 mb each month.
What does your site need?
Most personal and small business sites will do fine with the basic hosting package I offer. If you have a large back-end database, several staff people with their own email accounts, or incorporate large amounts of multi-media, you may need more.
A lot of hosting companies offer 'unlimited' storage and bandwidth. What's that really mean?
You may need to dig through their terms of service. Realistically, they need to store the files somewhere - so unless they have an infinite number of hard drives, they don't have unlimited storage. Same with bandwidth; they may have a very large capacity, but it's NOT unlimited.
Generally, what this really means is that they know the average website won't need nearly as much space as they have available, so they don't limit space for the few that need more. For bandwidth it means that if someone else isn't using it, you can. If your host ends up with too many bandwidth-intensive sites running full-tilt at the same time, your visitors will see page-load errors, but your hosting company won't put a hard limit on how much you can use.